Jane Clifton awards her ‘Bully of the Year’ to the European Union for its response to the UK’s Brexit vote. But the UK was asking for it. Brexit is a desperate attempt to preserve the image of the empire, the British Empire of by gone days. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Weiss’ Washington Post article (SST Escape, 30 December) on the movie ‘Vice’ and its director, Adam McKay, is a joy, at once informative, entertaining, and hard hitting. But while my wife and I thought the movie itself was close to that we wondered if it had really made it clear what McKay was trying to say about Cheney. Read the rest of this entry »

The nuclear powers once again resort to the existentially deadly cliché that so-called ‘nuclear deterrence’ is undermined by disarmament treaties like the current Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017 Nobel Peace Prize winner) (Dom Post 04/12/18). Read the rest of this entry »

Danielle McLaughlin (SST 22 July) discusses the dangers of U.S. President Donald Trump’s apparent naivety in dealing with Russia’s Putin. But she doesn’t mention the place that Russia has in Trump’s world view which is potentially more dangerous. Read the rest of this entry »

In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump claimed he wanted to “make America great again”. What he was referring to was that heady time just after WW II when the USA was the only military to possess the atomic bomb. And following on with the cold war when the USA was top dog and the Soviet Union was trying to keep up but only managing just-under dog, both keeping the whole world as nuclear hostage.

You could see that at work as Trump was meeting Putin in Helsinki. It’s a natural pairing as Putin is an oligarch and Trump wants to be one. Trump needs a powerfully nuke-armed Russia (almost as) super power to recreate that surreal and insane world.

With ubiquitous computer hackers and secret operatives around the globe the current media and political emphasis on Russian hacking of the US election could be a distraction from the larger danger.